Over the past decade, the worldwide proliferation of computers and networks has made success in commerce and investing depend even more on rapid access to information that is both accurate and specifically tailored to achieving a particular financial goal. Nowhere has the dependence on speedy access to vast repositories of data been more pronounced than in the global equity markets. Investors around the world require accurate, timely information in order to determine which investment possibilities present the best chance for maximizing their returns. Companies such as brokerage firms, which traditionally disseminated such information in the form of printed reports, have supplemented these printed reports by establishing proprietary networks that electronically collect at a central repository documents that provide financial information about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other investment vehicles. Subscribers can download such documents by connecting to the central repository through a network, such as the Internet, for example.
In a previously proposed document storage and retrieval system, a central repository receives financial documents for electronic storage from a plurality of contributor workstations. This repository comprises a database and associated server. The plurality of contributor workstations is networked with the central repository, either through a server or the Internet. At each contributor workstation, a contributor prepares a document by using any suitable word processor application, text editor, or proprietary tool. This document may include financial information about a particular stock. After preparing the document, the contributor converts the document to a portable digital file (PDF) using, for example, the PostScript software package. Because of this conversion, the document no longer is an informational entity, but is instead a visual representation of this information. This is because the PDF is formatted according to codes that do not actually contain information that can be searched; instead, these codes of the PDF are intended to visually represent the document information, and they can be translated into viewable form on a display only by PDF viewer software such as ADOBE ACROBAT. Thus, a consequence of this conversion is that the actual contents of the PDF will not be known until they are actually displayed by the display of a subscriber computer. In order to compensate for such a loss of information, the contributor also prepares a separate record that summarizes the contents of the associated PDF. However, such records will contain only information that describes in a general manner the information represented in the associated PDF file; specific financial data represented in the associated PDF will not be present in this record. Moreover, the information represented in these PDFs can be of various types; the records that are associated with these PDFs are simply not flexible enough to accommodate all these various kinds of information.
Once the contributor has prepared a record, the contributor submits the PDF and associated record to the central repository. Subscribers access the central repository through their respective personal computers, which can access the central repository through a web server that is coupled to the central repository through the Internet. Subscribers who wish to obtain documents that include certain desired information formulate and transmit to the central repository search queries directed to such desired information. As explained above, the search performed at the repository cannot sift through the actual PDFs because they are not informational entities; instead, the search must analyze the information in the records associated with these PDFs. Since the information in these records is of a very general nature, search inquiries that are narrowly tailored to finding specific financial information are useless. For example, a user is interested in retrieving from the central repository documents that provide information about stocks with a P/E ratio of 30 or less. A person using this previously proposed system cannot focus his search on the basis of such narrow criteria because the records associated with the PDFs do not contain such specific information. Therefore, the user will have to formulate a search query that is based on much more general criteria; as a result, the PDFs that are downloaded to the user's computer for viewing most likely will relate to stocks that the user has no interest in. Thus, the previously proposed system is useful only for performing searches based on broadly defined criteria. Indeed, if the user wishes to obtain from such a system only those documents with very specific desired information, the user will have to open and inspect each and every document on the system. Therefore, the previously proposed system cannot reasonably accommodate users with very specific and particularized search needs.
Moreover, since the files in this system are downloaded as PDFs, the user cannot customize the manner in which the document is viewed. For example, the user cannot instruct his computer to display the P/E information of these received PDFs in the form of tables or any other desired viewing format.
What is therefore needed is a system that stores documents without producing the information loss described above and that permits searches to be performed on the actual information of such documents in order to allow subscribers to access only those documents that satisfy narrowly crafted search criteria.